Understanding the Anxious Mind

Watching this video again makes Kagan fairly vibrate with the thrill of rediscovery: here on camera is the young girl who, as an infant, first embodied for him what it meant to be wired to worry.

Published: Sep 29, 2009
Length: 30 minutes (7,566 words)

The Next Brainiacs

This is the story of the most fearless entrepreneur ever: the human brain.

Source: Wired
Published: Sep 1, 2009
Length: 26 minutes (6,621 words)

The Power Of One

At age 17 Bonnie Richardson won the Texas state track team championship all by herself. Then she did it again

Author: Gary Smith
Published: Sep 28, 2009
Length: 26 minutes (6,510 words)

The Last Days of the Polymath

The word “polymath” teeters somewhere between Leo­nardo da Vinci and Stephen Fry. Embracing both one of history’s great intellects and a brainy actor, writer, director and TV personality, it is at once presumptuous and banal. Djerassi doesn’t want much to do with it. “Nowadays people that are called polymaths are dabblers—are dabblers in many different areas,” he says. “I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity.”

Published: Jan 10, 2009
Length: 18 minutes (4,569 words)

Something New on the Mall

We have never seen, at least in the modern history of the United States, a right-wing street-protest movement. Conservatives who oppose Roe v. Wade march on Washington every January 22, the anniversary of that 1973 decision; but aside from that single issue and that single day, the American right over recent decades has, until this summer, carried out its organizing in a comparatively quiet fashion, via mimeograph machine and pamphlet and book and e-mail and text message, and left the streets to the left.

Published: Sep 24, 2009
Length: 14 minutes (3,673 words)

The American Way of Dentistry

The story of my teeth.

Source: Slate
Published: Sep 28, 2009
Length: 6 minutes (1,549 words)

Rational Irrationality

The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 5, 2009
Length: 19 minutes (4,901 words)

The Dow Zero Insurgency

The nothing-can-be-believed chaos of the financial crisis created a golden opportunity for a blog run by a mysterious ex-hedge-funder with a dodgy past and conspiracy theories to burn.

Author: Joe Hagan
Published: Sep 27, 2009
Length: 21 minutes (5,337 words)

Aquacalypse Now

Published: Sep 28, 2009
Length: 11 minutes (2,979 words)

The Facebook Divorce

Couples are broadcasting their breakups online while friends — and lawyers! — watch in amazement and horror

Source: Salon
Published: Sep 29, 2009
Length: 11 minutes (2,861 words)